The gold ingots dated in the 1740's, purporting to have been produced at the Spanish Colonial mint of Mexico, have long since been exposed as 20th century fakes.(1) It is hardly necessary to recapitulate the evidence against them. The purpose of these remarks is rather to look at the way in which they were hyped for sale.
The bars are of several varieties, all linked by the use of common punches, and totalling at least 60 or 70 pieces produced.(2) All of the gold bars were in the possession of John J. Ford, jr., and were marketed by him.
The stories of their discovery were several and contradictory. When first they began to appear at the New Netherlands Coin Co. in New York it was put about that they came out of the American West. Then they had been discovered on an island off the Florida coast. The most detailed account was provided to me personally by Ford, as follows:
"About 1951 a document was found in a Mexico City bookstore which told the story of a Caribbean shipwreck of 1748.... The ship sank before leaving the Caribbean , but the gold (or some of it) was rescued and buried ashore to await further recovery. This document was recognizable as a copy of the captain's official report... an original existed in Spain, in the Archives of the Indies"
-- and so on, at some length.(3) One is struck by the exactitude of the details. Yet this cannot be true. Leaving aside any other consideration of the bars' authenticity, some of them bear the impression of a Mexican pillar dollar die, its date falling off the flan but of the variety with regal and imperial crowns, a variety first produced in 1754. Worse, the die carries a legend variety impossible before 1761. Worst, impressions of a second such die bear the assayer's initials FM, assignable only to the years 1770-71.
There is no way that the pillar dies can match the chronology of the bars themselves: the bars are all dated in the 1740's. To accommodate these anomalies once they had been pointed out, Ford's story shifted, and the wreck was deemed to have occurred rather later. The pillar die impressions were explained as a later "revalidation" of the bars at the mint.(4) This merely complicated matters, since gold bars, as we know from their production everywhere and at all times, are a means of preserving and transporting value. Ingots from the wrecks of Europe-bound vessels -- and such have been found -- were obviously intended to carry value across the ocean. That such should have lingered in Mexico for decades, then brought to the mint to be revalidated, makes no sense. Hodder suggests fancifully that they might have been stolen from the mint originally. And revalidated to what purpose? and how? The bars do not show the assayer's cuts common to Western American bars, that is, there was no attempt at analysis of the metal to justify an original validation, much less a revalidation.
It was also claimed in the auction catalogues that some of the bars represented the King's Fifth, the 20% levy on the income of the mines.(5) But the King's Fifth, intended to finance the operations of the Colonial government, never went through the mint. (6)
All of the above is simply an attempt to create an account with which the various markings on the bars themselves would cohere. Nor are they the only stories. The larger version would have it that the bars came to Ford through "intermediaries" of the Florida finders. On other occasions Ford has claimed that the Spanish Colonial bars came to him from the estate of F.C. Boyd. A fourth version was that he had rescued them from a dealer in precious metal scrap who had been about to melt them down. (7)
None of this nonsense need be very surprising, since Ford commonly invented supporting texts for the various material which he offered for sale, although in this case it might have been better to stick to a single version. Many of his Western American "assay bars" have appeared in auction catalogues accompanied by similar fabrications, intended to authenticate the bars and give them an interesting context.
What is unusual with regard to the Spanish Colonial bars is the open admission that the story of the Florida shipwreck was false. In 1999 Michael Hodder, an employee of Ford and Stack's, published an elaborate defense of the Western American "assay bars", with some side comments on others of Ford's creations.(8) In the case of the Mexican bars Hodder admitted, however, that the story of the Florida shipwreck was false. These are his words:
"At the time of their appearance on the market, these [Spanish Colonial] bars had acquired what may politely be called a legend, that attempted to explain how they were discovered." (p.90)
This is far from the whole truth: the "legend" had not been acquired previously; rather, it was invented by Ford to accompany the bars when they were put up for sale. Hodder continues in a footnote:
"The legend can be read in Buttrey 1974, 28-29. It takes the form of an undated private communication from John J. Ford, jr., to Buttrey, in which a fanciful tale of a secret treasure map found in an old archive, a 1748 Spanish shipwreck, and a few other elements are woven together into a tapestry of wonders.... The legend may have had some crude attraction in the 1960s. To a modern reader, it can be read as a marketing tactic designed to give the bars the flavor of recovered treasure. Unfortunately for the bars' subsequent numismatic history, the legend became the starting point for the only focused study yet published on them."
This is an extraordinary statement, and ought to be read carefully for what it reveals about both Ford and Hodder. I will return to Hodder in another essay in this study; it is enough here to point out how disingenuous this whole procedure is. There was never a "legend"; the story was Ford's creation. It is absurd to say that "unfortunately ... the legend became the starting point for the only focused study yet published on them [Buttrey 1973-74]" -- and leave it at that. If the confection of the legend was unfortunate, why did Ford not correct it? The fact is that the false claim of the Florida shipwreck was put about by Ford himself, and is to be found printed in the auction catalogues where he offered his bars for sale. Thus for example, NASCA, 14 August 1978 ("Wayte Raymond coll. Part III") [the bars of course had nothing to do with Wayte Raymond], lots 3166-67: "apparently lost in transit to Spain prior to 1750" [ignoring the hard evidence that made this date impossible]; and "patination ... probably the result of contact with sea water."
Just by the way, lot 3167 of the NASCA sale was also enlivened by the information that "A cut-down ingot of similar period and design exists in the Garrett Collection at The Johns Hopkins University, acquired by John Garrett during the earlier years of this Century." This statement is false: there was never such a gold bar in the Garrett collection. The importance of the statement lies not just in hyping the desirability of the bar whose analog resided in such an important collection, but also in validating its authenticity by likening it to a piece already attested many years before.
As to the shipwreck and Florida-find story, as late as 1990 Ford was still making this false claim.(9) The false accounts of the shipwreck, or suggestions that there might have been one, were a major part of the package, on the basis of which customers were persuaded to buy what appeared to be historically interesting numismatic material.
Hodder's admission is staggering, and it will not do for him to laugh off Ford's fraudulent shipwreck story as a "legend" or a "fanciful tale", "a tapestry of wonders". He softens it with language such as "what may be politely called a legend" (p.90), and "an obvious legend" (p.143). Hodder acknowledged that Ford fabricated a history for the bars which has still remained uncorrected by him to this very day. Hodder also says why -- a "marketing tactic designed to give the bars the flavor of treasure", and again, "The story that the Mexican bars were shipwrecked gold made at the Mexico City Mint is an obvious legend meant to enhance the marketability of the bars" (p.78). No, it is not a legend; it is a lie. What Hodder actually does is to confirm John Ford's outrageous lack of scholarly and commercial ethics -- this is fraud, and is actionable.
None of this, too, need be very surprising, but it is important to have Ford's own agent finally confirming it. Ford himself has never acknowledged this fraud. Note, again, what is hiding in Hodder's phrase, "...the only focused study yet published on [the Colonial bars]", namely Buttrey 1973-74. Yes, Ford never rebutted its conclusions, but went right on selling the bars, with their false history. His one contribution to the study was to circulate a letter to the numismatic press in the United States after the lecture at the International Numismatic Congress threatening libel action against anyone who would dare to publish it. He was quite successful in this: even the American Numismatic Society was frightened off, and the article was published in Mexico, well away from Ford's customers.
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